[COMMENT: This bit by Rushdoony is a
powerful and accurate portrayal of things in "modernity". It is
about the secular captivity of "modern" Christianity, and describes the enemy we
face. See
The Theology of Civil Government for much, perhaps most, of the answer
to the problem. I am not a full-fledged Rushdoonian, but he is right
on target here. E. Fox]

The New Sovereignty

After 1660, the foundations of Western culture
began to shift away from Christianity. This was a resumption of a trend
which began in the late middle ages and resulted in the Renaissance. The
new, humanistic culture of the Enlightenment was primarily a culture of the
court, of intellectuals, artists, and some of the clergy. This dominant
culture did not reach into the lower classes except to impoverish them
religiously and economically, so that eighteenth-century peoples were on a
very low, neglected, and debased level.

The explosion which
affected all classes was the French Revolution, which insisted on a new
foundation and a new creed for all men. As surely as St. Dominic and Francis
had been reformers, and, later, Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and Loyola, so too
the revolutionary leaders were reformers, but of a different kind. As Otto
Scott noted, they did not begin by reforming themselves: "they expected to
reform others."1
This was a major break with Christendom. In pagan antiquity, reform had
meant the imposition of the will of a man or a group on all society. Gaius
Marius (157-86 BC) craved justice for Rome with a great intensity, for
example, but he had, as G.P. Baker noted, no doctrine of original sin. His
solution was to see evil in others and then to destroy them in order to save
Rome.2
Marius as a result had no patience nor interest in the ordinary legal
processes of civil life. Instead, he bypassed them to gain quick "reform"
and "justice." This meant the sack of Rome, corpses in the streets, the
ravishing of the wives and children of all his enemies, and the pillaging of
their properties. Marius's fretfulness over injustice made him a monster of
vengeance.3
Because the Romans had no transcendental doctrine of sovereignty, lordship
inevitably belonged to the state and its ruler.

In the French Revolution,
Robespierre could declare in the Assembly, "The People are the Law," and
hence the sovereign.4
In practice, this meant, in terms of Rousseau, that the general will of the
people was made manifest in the people's voice, Robespierre. Because reason
was sovereign, and Reason, the attribute of man, did not come into its own
in the common man but rather in the general will and its elite voice,
Robespierre was thus the sovereign, the voice of Reason, and the voice of
Virtue. Fouche and d'Herbois set forth an edict which sums up the spirit of
revolutions: "All is permitted those who act in the Revolutionary
direction."5

An unappreciated aspect of
the French Revolution and its aftermath, the Napoleonic Wars and their
impact on all of Europe, was its effect on the universities. This in itself
was one of the most far-reaching of all revolutions.6
Before the French Revolution, despite the presence of Enlightenment
scholars, the university was still what some term "medieval." This means
that its basic orientation was still formally theological. The triune God, His enscriptured and
revealed word, and the ordained order of creation, were seen as the object
of study, the ultimate source of knowledge, and the focus for all learning.
Although the state had previously funded its universities in many cases, the
state still saw itself and its universities as formally under God. The slow erosion of the theological
foundations of society and learning were greatly stepped up by the French
Revolution.

The university began to shift from a theological
to a civil foundation, and Germany led the way. Scholars like Kant,
Humboldt, Fichte, Hegel, Savigny, Schleiermacher, and others began to remake
the university. It was now a civil agency, and the focus of the university
and its learning was not on God but on the state. In 1492, Columbus, by his
discovery of the Americas, gave centrality to an already developing era of
exploration. There was a new world for man to explore and conquer. The
French Revolution in its own way opened up what to many was an even more
important new world, a man-centered world. The focal point of society was
now not God but either man or the state.

A major consequence of this
was its impact on the meaning of salvation. Whereas for orthodox
Christianity salvation means regeneration by God's grace with the
forgiveness of sins through Christ's atonement, for revolutionary men it
means the change of political and economic systems by means of a political
gospel. Sin is identified with those who uphold the "old order," i.e.,
Christianity, a respect for orderly legal processes, justice as God's
revealed law, and so on. Knowledge is no longer tied to God's order, or to
any objective order: "knowledge merely reflects power." It is a social
construct of a class in power. Revolutionary knowledge means the denial of
truth to anything other than the revolutionary creed. Within the church,
this means liberation theology, which means that where revolutionists
declare themselves to be the voice of an ostensibly oppressed group, the
revolutionists and their views constitute virtue and knowledge. In place of
the Biblical doctrine of sin, the revolutionists hold to a "belief that the
evil of this world is unique to a political system, and can be overcome by
political action on behalf of a rival social order." This view marks
humanists and Marxists alike. It means, "Morality is that which serves to
destroy the old exploiting society." For Christianity, salvation means faith
in the atonement of Jesus Christ; there is then reconciliation with God. The
new faith has no reconciliation, only annihilation. Salvation is only for
the revolutionary party; all others must, like demons, be exorcised.7
This exorcism we see in all its murderous intensity in Marxist states; in
other states, the drift is in the same direction. For modern man
increasingly, like Gaius Marius of old Rome, evil is in other men, in the
opposition, and the solution is to destroy them. Lacking any sense of either
the depravity of man or the sovereignty of God, modern man sees himself as
sovereign and other men as fallen and evil.

In the Book of Homilies of Edward VI, we have a statement which correctly
assesses all men:

Because all men be
sinners and offenders against God, and breakers of his law and
commandments, therefore can no man by his own acts, works, and deeds,
seem they never so good, be justified and made righteous before God; but
every man of necessity is constrained to seek for another righteousness
or justification, to be received at God's own hands, that is to say, the
remission, pardon, and forgiveness of his sins and trespasses in such
things as he hath offended. And this justification or righteousness,
which we so receive by God's mercy and Christ's merits, embraced by
faith, is taken, accepted, and allowed of God for our perfect and full
justification.8

These homilies were written
for Renaissance men, for a generation which arrogantly assumed its own
participation in divinity. Well after Edward VI, in 1604, we see this in
George Chapman's play,
Bussy D'Ambois.
When D'Ambois is fatally wounded, he is amazed that he is mortal and can
die. He has no desire for grace from God but rather faces death with
arrogant pride, and considers complaining to God about his wounding:

Is my body, then,But penetrable flesh? And must my mindFollow my blood? Can my divine part addNo aid to th' earthly in extremity?Then these divines are but for form, not fact.Man is of two sweet courtly friends compact,A mistress and a servant; let my deathDefine life nothing but a courtier's breath.Nothing is made of nought, of all things made,Their abstract being a dream but of a shade.I'll not complain to earth yet, but to Heaven,And, like a man, look upwards even in death.And if Vespasian thought in majestyAn emperor might die standing, why not I?9

When D'Ambois says, "Then these divines are but
for form, not fact," he declares theologians to be unrealistic. (His
"divines" are, of course, Renaissance thinkers.) This does not make D'Ambois
humble before God. He goes on to say,

The equal thought I
bear of life and deathShall make men faint on no side.10

D'Ambois belongs to the world of Marius, and the
world of Marius is very much with us in Marxism, in modern education, in
liberation theology, and more.

How far gone we are is apparent in the death of
teaching and preaching on the sovereignty of God. Failure to recognize that
God is the sovereign means that He is treated as a human resource, and Jesus
Christ is seen as the great fire and life insurance agent. The church then
becomes an ally of every modern Marius and his humanistic dream of justice.

The culture of the modern
era is centered on man and the state. It has created a world in which men
see salvation as the coercion of other men, and "all is permitted those who
act in the Revolutionary direction."11
It has made the twentieth century the bloodiest century of all history, with
a higher percentage of the population being murdered than ever before, as G.
Eliot, in The Twentieth
Century Book of the Dead, has documented. The new foundation for society has
demonstrated its deadly nature.